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The Venice Film Festival, the world's oldest celebration of cinema, turns 70 this year. But it's not resting on its laurels. "It's a highly competitive business," says artistic director AlbertoBarbera of Venice's place on the festival circuit. "You have to innovate continually or risk becoming irrelevant." With that in mind, the 2013 edition, which runs Aug. 28 to Sept. 7, is pulling out the stops.

➻ 3D: "We open with a 3D film and close with one since this seems to be the direction things are going," says Barbera. The curtain-raiser is the world premiere of AlfonsoCuaron's lost-in-space feature Gravity, starring SandraBullock and GeorgeClooney. (The actor always is welcome in Venice, where he has won awards for 2011's The Ides of March and 2005's Good Night, and Good Luck.) And it will close with ThierryRagobert's Amazonia, about a monkey raised in captivity that is released into the rain forest.

➻ World premieres: Venice always has insisted that nearly all of the films in its competition are world premieres, and this year's festivalgoers will be the first to see both StephenFrears' Philomena, starring JudiDench as a woman searching for the son she gave up for adoption, and TerryGilliam's The Zero Theorem, about a computer hacker searching for the meaning of human existence. "I've always loved coming to Venice, a beautiful and wonderful city," says Gilliam. "I like to think of my film surrounded by all the gondolas and the sinking palazzos."

➻ Virtual screenings: Can't make it to the Lido? Expanding an initiative begun in 2012, the movies in the Horizons sidebar, which focuses on new trends in filmmaking -- for example, director Agnes B.'s Je m'appelle Hmmm … -- will stream on the festival's website. A limited number of tickets for the virtual screenings will be available for €4 (about $5.50) each on the site.

➻ Docs: For the first time, the festival is including documentaries in its competition selection. On tap are ErrolMorris' The Unknown Known: The Life and Times of Donald Rumsfeld, a portrait of President GeorgeW.Bush's controversial secretary of defense, and GianfrancoRosi's Sacro GRA, which looks at the highway that circles Rome.